CARLO MARATTI. — Painter, born in Camerano (Ancona) on 15 May 1625, died in Rome on 15 December 1713. Leading exponent and founder of the pictorial movement descended, through Sacchi and Albani, from the Bolognese Academy of the Carracci.
He absorbed many traits of the contemporary Baroque of Pietro da Cortona and Gaulli, tempering their exuberance and fervour in a painting that was both measured and rhetorical, governed by Raphaelite canons of grace, proportion, and decorum. He also assimilated attitudes and styles from artists of diverse and even opposing tendencies, such as Guido Reni in particular, Albani and Domenichino, Guercino and Romanelli, Bernini and Poussin. Of note is the influence upon him of the archaeologist and scholar Gian Pietro Bellori, the foremost exponent of seventeenth-century idealist aesthetics, who soon converted Maratti to the principle of ideal painting, drawn from natural beauties yet superior to nature, and extolled the painter’s works as the exemplary realization of his theories on art.
All these characteristics are evident in Maratti’s works from around 1660, which often display Berninian inspirations, Reni-like chromatic preciosity (Nativity in S. Giuseppe dei Falegnami, Rome, 1650; Nativity and Flight into Egypt, 1652, in S. Isidoro Agricola), or luministic touches in the manner of Guercino (St Francesca Romana in Ascoli Piceno; St Augustine in S. Maria dei Sette Dolori, Rome; Annunciation of Anagni, 1659). Around and after 1670, Maratti ventured into dynamic and crowded compositions, sometimes achieving a dazzling intensity of colour (altarpieces for the Gesù and the Vallicella), more often inclining toward swollen and expansive forms (altarpiece of S. Carlo al Corso; ceiling of Palazzo Altieri; spandrels of the chapels of the Presentation and the Choir in St Peter’s, Vatican). An inexhaustible creator of altarpieces, he also essayed secular compositions, in which he was chiefly guided by Domenichino; many of these works are now dispersed in foreign museums.
Among the painters of his time, even outside Rome, he excelled in portraiture, where he attained profound psychological penetration, never divorced, however, from a subtle idealization of the subject. After beginning with simple and intimate portraits inspired by the manner of Domenichino and Sacchi—among which should be cited the most noble portrait of Clement IX in the Vatican Picture Gallery—Maratti in his mature years turned to emphatic, action-filled portraits, exact exemplifications of Bernini’s canons. Of this later portraiture, now largely dispersed, an example survives in the image, believed to represent his daughter Faustina as Cleopatra, in the Palazzo Venezia Museum, notable for its Baroque opulence of form, structural density, and delicate chromatic harmonies. — See pl. I.